About a month ago we saw comments from John Carmack indicating
that Linux versions of RAGE and the new DOOM game were up in the air, as
the id technical director said: "There are no firm plans for linux ports of the
idTech 5 titles, but it certainly isnít off the table." Now a later email
exchange with Mr. Carmack posted to the
Ubuntu Forums
(thanks Ant and LinuxGames)
indicates that the chances they will port their Tech5 titles to Linux are
nearing ever-closer to the edge of that table, with a later exchange repeating
his thinking that it "probably wouldn't be all that bad to get it running on the
nvidia binary drivers, but the chance of it working correctly and acceptably
anywhere else would be small." Here's his overview of the situation:

The
PC and Mac versions are still OpenGL 2.x.

We are not currently scheduling native linux ports. It isn't out of the
question, but I don't think we will be able to justify the work. If there are
hundreds of thousands of linux users playing Quake Live when we are done with
Rage, that would certainly influence our decision...

However, I'm looking at my system resource usage right now in Win7 and, at idle, it's using 18% of my 8GB of system RAM

I assume this is a 64bit machine running Windows 7 64bit ?

Silly me, I thought the average memory on a average desktop PC in an average home was 1gb max. I'd be worried if my win7 was using over 1gb of ram doing nothing, my desktop at work is 7win and it's only got 512mb ( because it's a basic office PC ) and it's only using 210mb idle.

The point about having an OS that uses less resources is about getting more for less. In basic tests a true multi-user system running on a Windows Server compared to the same system running on Linux servers , you can get a lot more uses working comfortably on the Linux than on Windows, why? because the OS has a much smaller overhead ( and Linux is based on Unix which is a mutli-user OS, where as Windows is a single user desktop OS, despite the 'Server' label MS sticks on some of it's products. ).

So in simple terms - IF your apps were available for Linux or have good Linux alternatives then you could have built your machine with only 4gb of memory and saved yourself a few dollars.( guessing you're American ) - of course you'll say memory is cheap now, true, but my new laptop for work was ordered with winXP and 4gb - guess what - winXP could only access the first 3gb - not a problem because I wiped it and install Kubuntu 9.04 64bit, now it's able to use all 4gb.(posting from that laptop and very happy with the desktop )

The point of Joe public going into a 'bestbuy ( don't have them in the UK I think ) and picking up a bit of sortware and then finding it doesn't work is not a valid point. I've known that exact thing happen, difference is it was an old cheap PC game and it failed to work on Windows XP! ( it was a DOS game and for some reason refused to run from a DOS prompt in WinXP ).I've also heard of people buying Windows software and being surprised that it doesn't work on their Mac!There will always be people that fail to read(or understand) the min reqs on a bit of software.